(1962, b/w; "The Finger Man," French) "To die or to lie," that is the question. As in the final scene of Hamlet, director/screenwriter Jean-Pierre Melville's film noir of cops and hoods with a jazz score, based on Pierre Lesou's novel, the stage will be littered with bodies.

After taking a gun from a drawer in Gilbert Varnove's home, where the two men have been discussing plans for a heist as the older man works on a stash of jewelry from an earlier Avenue Mozart burglary to be fenced, Maurice Faugel (Serge Reggiani), recently released after a four-year stint in prison, shoots dead the man who's taken him in. Fleeing the house just as two other men arrive, Maurice, wearing a trench coat in the fog, buries the gun, the jewels, and a bundle of currency under a street lamp.

To Thèrése (Monique Hennessy) Dalmain's flat tight-lipped Silien (Jean-Paul Belmondo) delivers the equipment Maurice will need for breaking into the safe; Maurice's girl enters before Silien leaves, telling Maurice of what she'd seen of the evening's target. After placing a phone call to Police Inspector Salignari, Silien returns to Thèrése's apartment where he strikes her, binds and gags her, and gets her to divulge the address where the burglary is to take place in Neuilly.

As Maurice and Rémy are at work on the safe inside the house, the police arrive; in a gun fight, Rémy and Salignari are killed while Maurice, wounded in the shoulder, escapes with the assistance of someone picking him up unconscious and driving him to Anita's place. Following a friendly doctor's extraction of the bullet, Maurice gives Anita (who doesn't know who brought him since she wasn't home) a note describing the location under the lamp to be given only to Jean.

Stopped while walking the street by three cops in a car, Silien is taken in for questioning; he denies being a rat and refuses to cooperate, though Salignari was a close friend. After saying he intends to find the killer himself if the police don't get the bastard first, he's told about Thèrése's body in her car after it plunged off a cliff and finally agrees to help locate Maurice.

Found in a bar, the cops arrest Maurice; Superintendant Clain (Jean Desailly) interrogates the gangster, looking for a lead in the Neuilly shootings and offering a deal since he's a suspect in the Varnove's murder (motive being that Gilbert reportedly drowned Maurice's girl Arlette five years earlier). "I don't rat," replies Maurice before getting locked up in a cell with Kern and another prisoner.

At night Silien in a fedora and trench coat digs up the loot under the lamp before going to the Cotton Club where he tells Fabienne (Fabienne Dali), a former flame currently Mr Armand's mistress, that if she'll testify that Nuttheccio and Armand were responsible for killing Varnove, he'll make sure she'll be free of the boss's hold on her.

Silien believes Maurice is innocent of Varnove's murder, but he's clearly implicated in killing Salinari. Taking the jewels, the cash, and the gun back to the Cotton Club late at night, Silien makes good on his promise to Fabienne.

Maurice asks Jean (Philippe March): "Who fingered me?"

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